A film adaptation, produced by Robert Redford, starring Redford and Dustin Hoffman as Woodward and Bernstein, respectively, was released in 1976. That same year, a sequel to the book, The Final Days, was published, which chronicled the last months of Nixon's presidency, starting around the time their previous book ended.

Woodward and Bernstein had considered the idea of writing a book about Watergate, but did not commit until actor Robert Redford expressed interest in purchasing the film rights. In Telling the Truth About Lies: The Making of "All the President's Men," Woodward noted that Redford played an important role in changing the book's narrative from a story about the Watergate events to one about their investigations and reportage of the story.[3]

The name of the book alludes to the nursery rhyme about Humpty Dumpty ("All the king's horses and all the king's men / Couldn't put Humpty together again"). An allusion similar to that was made more explicitly a quarter-century earlier in the Robert Penn Warren novel All the King's Men, which describes the career of a fictional corrupt governor, loosely based on Huey Long.

Dick Snyder of Simon & Schuster purchased the right to publish the book through the agent David Obst. The authors received an advance of $55,000.[6] In his memoir, Michael Korda said of the book's publication that it "transformed book publishing into a red-hot part of media" and books became "news" instead of history.